I recall being super excited when I chose my course to study at university about 5 years ago.
It was going to be a Bachelor's program in Computer Applications, and I'd heard that we would focus quite a lot on learning to code, and that alone had me waiting for the first day of college.
But with that, let's fast forward to my graduation, by when I had just had enough of the whole coding jazz; I don't mean this as a complaint from a sore loser whose motivation didn't stick through till the end, but I think I really lost that tingle I had to learn to code. I believe that this was mainly thanks to the way we were taught to code by not one, but nearly all our professors.
So I had always had a few things that made me super excited and tingly to work with: learning and using the Japanese language, trying to learn to solve problems through code, and creating real stuff with my hands through crafting.
Now, I was down to 2 things: Japanese and crafting.
After graduation, I tried applying for a developer role that would require major Japanese support. This was me trying to revive the tingle for my less-than-an-amateur-level developer side, yes. But as luck would have it, I got scouted by a semiconductor company on LinkedIn and worked in their Product Strategy department for the next 2 years, and this required me to be completely disconnected from whatever I had studied in college.
No matter how much I seemed to learn every other day, I'd always have this gnawing feeling in me that made me want to do justice to that passion because of which I started to study Computer Science (CS now on) at uni.
I'd usually been fairly confident of my front-end skills (once again, less-than-an-amateur-level), specially thanks to the fact that I had worked on the front-end for an Android application which was partly required for my graduation, in the final semester.
Having read quite a bit about people learning to code from scratch and going on to become pretty proficient at it, I chose this as my starting point and thus decided to start off with learning web development off the web.
I should mention here that I have completed CodeCademy's basic HTML course multiple times, a little bit of their CSS and JavaScript courses and left it at that, always vowing to return and learn more, yet again repeating the same cycle.
Day 01: 2018 August 18 (Thursday)
I was at my uncle's place on holiday and having quit my job quite recently (owing to multiple reasons), I once again strayed onto CodeCademy's website on my cousin's computer and just...stared at the screen.
Unsure if it happened right away or after I clicked upon the Web Development course (yet again), there popped a notification saying I was qualified for a free 7-day trial of their Pro track for the course.
And duh, of course I dove right in (yet again, yup~).
I sure got lucky this time because this consisted of their complete Web Development teachings comprising of the fundamentals for HTML, CSS, GitHub, hosting the site online and so on!
Almost right away, I could see how very different and wonderful the Pro track was when compared to the free one. Thanks to the coffee I'd had a little before and this wonderful soundtrack, I got right into the mood and solved my way through all the HTML exercises and quizzes, and was happy to see my progress at it, mainly thanks to the quiz and mock-practice sessions which form a core of the Pro track.
In just a few hours, I had finished with the HTML part and reached the start of the CSS section.
I gulped; CSS was something I'd tried a little bit before and though I enjoyed it, I wasn't so great at remembering the correct syntax involved.
So I kinda skipped it. Well, postponed it should be apt, I suppose...
***
In the last several months, I had read several stories on multiple sites about how people learnt to code from scratch, like I mentioned here above. One of those who had inspired me had recommended checking out Jon Duckett's book about HTML and CSS.
Very sorry to say that I now do not recall which person stated this, and in which website they did...do you get me when I say I recall the song but not the singer?
I got a copy of the book on my iPad and told myself that I'd resume with the CSS part of the course only when I finished reading all the chapters related to HTML in the book.
Gotta say it, this book is pretty cool and awesome, with simple yet super crisp content! I would definitely recommend you to read it if interested.
However, it was already late night by the time I finished a few chapters and found it monotonous to leaf through yet another page, when I should have been sleeping.
And that, is when I randomly checked out Apple's Swift Playgrounds app after reading about it a little bit. And boy was I glad I did!
Apple sure has done / is doing a brilliant job at aiming to teaching young kids to code. I say this because I definitely fell head over heels with how this app has been designed, how the concepts of Swift are taught in a gaming-console like set-up, where the learner has to start off by using Functions to move the cute main character on screen to collect diamonds and toggle these floorboards (so here, the Boolean concept is covered subtly)!
Spent quite a good amount of time working on it before calling it a night, and was looking forward to learning more.
***
Sorry to keep you waiting about the challenge-part, but it was when I tucked into the couch to sleep that I thought I should seriously embark on a coding challenge everyday, with 18 August as Day 01.
I thought it might be better to embark on a 1000-day challenge rather than for 100 days, because this would give my goal of wanting to get back to coding a lot more practice and perspective very easily.
It might be super hard, yes, but that being said I'm not going to be super hard on myself by chanting a mantra to "code everyday"; I want to keep it balanced with practicing coding and also to dedicated theoretical education of it.
So if I am super tired physically on a certain day, I'd want to spend an hour or so reading up about new concepts or those I've already started out.
So let's see, here goes nothing :) Good luck to me!
And FYI, I'm typing this on my second day which was full of theoretical study, and am gonna write the second day's entry on the third day xD